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Month: February 2024

A Day Late and…You Know

It is 8:30 p.m. and I am already posting a day late. I don’t know what to tell you–sometimes the brain it just won’t work. Last week I enjoyed a glorious five days in a row off work. One of the things I did was to take off to Sedona. I love Sedona. So much. Oh, hey! you’re probably thinking. Is this going to be another blog post full of rambling and pretty pictures? Yup. Though probably not a lot of rambling, as it’s already 9:45. What can I say? The brain. It don’t work. Here’s the cabin we called home for the weekend. It’s one room with a full bed and a pair of bunk beds, but also the very important heater as it got down to freezing both nights. No, seriously. I don’t plan to talk much at all. Check this out. My child told me I caught a UFO! I told them that must be lens flare somehow–it wasn’t there when I took the picture. They told me then it’s an orb (think ghost.) It’s just a tree, but I like it. It’s a gnarly tree! All of these were taken on my phone, by the way. It’s a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, and I love the camera so much I put up with the dang huge phone in my tiny hands. Full moon! I was trying for a nice edgy shot with the branches against the moon. Works a lot better without the branches. GEEZ I…

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Email Inbox Woes

So, why is this post being written at 2:15am on Wednesday instead of on Tuesday like it’s supposed to be? Well, I could tell you about a few things: a work emergency, a dental emergency that’s caused me to have an even more erratic sleep schedule for the past few days, but…actually, I just spent the past hour going through my email inbox. Trying to get things cleared out and ready for my night. Because anxiety. Because it’s the first (or second) thing I do. Because I have toooooo many things coming through, and it’s just getting out of hand. A Facebook post in a group I’m in actually inspired this post. People were comparing notes on how many unread emails were in their email inboxes and giving and receiving advice on how to clear them out…if at all. I saw some pretty huge numbers there, which honestly gave me heart palpitations, so I felt just a tiny bit better. But only a bit. See, I just went through a massive unsubscribe purge recently, which helped the situation a lot. But…there’s still a lot of business emails, and emails coming from people that I follow and want to read, but when these emails pour in, I just want to hide. Seriously. An hour a day, folks. I’ve joked that I need an assistant just to manage my email. I also routinely get those all-important business emails in spam despite whitelisting numerous times, so there’s always a spam email sweep added…

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Building in Procrastination

Heya, friends! I hope everyone enjoyed Across Worlds with You! (And if you missed it, all nine parts are now available in the freebies section!) Here we are, mid-February, about a month and a half into the year (which is a little crazy if you think about it). Last month I talked about why I thought everyone tends to be so productive at the beginning of January as well as my goals for the year, which including adding in side goals in reading, art, and video games and whether or not I thought that was going to be a bad idea. And now that we’re six weeks in, I’m going to say–I think they were a good idea. I can’t always concentrate on my big project. I’m not sure anyone is actually capable of 100% focus on their main project at all times. I’m tired from work, or I only have ten minutes before I need to go do something, or my brain is just fried in general. What I found last year was that when I hit these times I tended toward binging YouTube or playing hours of Minesweeper or something along those lines, which was frustrating because I was not doing what I wanted to be doing and also wasn’t enjoying my time doing whatever it was I was doing instead. So what I’ve found with the addition of the side goals is that instead of defaulting to the dumbest thing possible when I can’t work up motivation,…

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Black Histories and Afrofuturisms

It’s Black History Month in Canada and the US, friends. I would encourage you to listen to and amplify Black voices this month (and every month). Here are some I’ve been listening to and reading, and some I’m looking forward to… Listening Reading Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. This fantasy novella is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure elevated by the way the author plays with language. The main character, Demane, code-switches between Black American slang and other dialects when he’s speaking, while the narration is more poetic and literary. It’s set in a secondary world based on Africa – and I do mean Africa as a whole, because there’s a lot of travelling and we get a sense of places beyond the edges of the story, too. And the characters are all beautifully drawn, from Demane’s queer love interest (no HEA, though) to the caravan security grunts they’re travelling with. One of the best books I read last year. Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby. A near-future novella full of violence, suffering, and anger about what it can look like to be Black in America, and yet it’s also about love, protection, and hope. It’s fierce in so many senses of the word. Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine. This is a wild contemporary-fantasy ride through complex family relationships, demigods, Toronto, hoodoo, lake monsters, cats, music, kudzu, and more…as you can tell by the wonderful cover. Brown Girl in the Ring has many of the same elements and is equally cool. N.K.…

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Across Worlds with You, Part 9 (Final) by Kit Campbell

Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7 Part 8 Across Worlds with You, Part 9Kit Campbell “Okay,” Theo said for the fifteenth time. “So, just for the record, we might die instantly.” “You said that already,” Will said. He should be worried about potentially dying instantly, but for some reason he wasn’t. Maybe his brain had gone back to the psychotic episode theory. Maybe he’d bought into the whole prophecy thing. Or maybe he innately trusted Theo’s magic. Or just Theo. Anyway, Theo or his magic hadn’t led Will astray yet. They were standing in yet another waystation. While Theo opened the gate—was he getting sick of opening gates? Had he ever opened a gate before he’d come to save Will?—Will stared around at it. This one was a light blue stone, almost like turquoise or aquamarine. Who had created the waystations? Why were they all subtly different? Or maybe they weren’t there at all—maybe it was just how their brains, or Will’s, at least, perceived it. He should ask Theo what he saw. Although not right now. The blue of the gate opening illuminated the corridor in front of Will, bringing it up to daylight levels. He turned to find Theo packing his supplies back into his bag. They’d packed the amulets as well. “Okay,” Theo said yet again. “Let’s go over this one more time. I’ve enchanted these”—he indicated two new, different amulets in his hand—“to block the Darkness’s powers so we can walk through it without…

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